Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Game and economic theory

Given that Vox is both an ascribed creationist Christian and an avowed proponent of the School of Austrian Economics, I find it completely fitting that he is also a proponent of game while completely dismissing the relevancy of evolutionary biology and psychology that are the so-called sciences cited by many game proponents and PUA. In the comment thread of Vox's response to GBFM, he writes:

"Evolutionary biology is nothing but ex post facto fairy tales and psychology is bullshit. Game doesn't require grounding in anything but observation of human behavior and the construction of predictive models from it. The "why" is irrelevant."

In other words, Game as we've come to know it here on these fringes of teh Interwebz, is a Praxeology...i.e. Game is the deductive study of human sexuality and inter-relational behavior based on the action axiom - "If a condition holds, then the following should be done."

Here is but one example that I can think of off the top of my head, that is a game-based action axiom:

*** Women often "fitness test" or "shit test" men. Men interested in mating with a woman need to learn how to recognize when she does this. When he ascertains that in fact she is attempting to fitness test him, there are several known responses that other men have employed with varying degrees of success, such as "agree and amplify."***

Looking at game as an exercise in Praxeology should help those who struggle with the morality of accepting these ideas of game description and proscription, versus the vehement distaste for the immorality of promiscuity many (but not all) game proponents advocate and celebrate.

While I am not trying to speak for anyone else here, I do believe the defining line between those of us in the MAndrosphere who are nominally Christian and advocate Christian Marriage (Vox, Dalrock et al), and see no conflict between Game and Christian morality, versus all the other Christians who are up in arms about it and repeatedly denounce it, is that those of us in favor, simply view game as a Praxeology; it is not a hard science, nor is it a moral code to live by. Rather, it is simply using deductive reasoning to come up with action axiom's to describe the hows and whys of human intersexual attraction and mating behaviors.

These action axioms are useful tools for men to recognize and reverse engineer the myriad of deliberately inculcated dysfunctional behaviors and characteristics that pervades societies institutions, mass media programming and subversion of our churches with the idolatry of Goddess worship. As more and more men embrace the axioms of the Game Praxeology, more and more discover anecdotally that they are based on observable truths regardless of the morality of the men doing the "testing in the field."

I tend to shy away from Austrian economics lingo, mostly because it was coined by erudite German-speaking Jews, and is thus virtual gibberish to the average reader. But Keoni is essentially correct and my outlook on Game is praxeological, which is to say that it is a straightforward matter of viewing human action as a series of probabilistic if-then relationships. The model is not a moral one because it does not consist of any "thou shalts" or "shoulds", but merely "iss" and "if-thens".

To put the action axiom in more complete terms: "If a condition holds, then the following should be done." would be more accurately stated thus: "If condition X holds, then Y should be done, given objective Z."

With regards to objective Z, as Mises wrote in Human Action, only the acting man can identify the reasons for his actions. So, to claim that Game is immoral, or anti-Christian, is to make a fundamental category error. One might as reasonably claim that a shovel is sinful or learning mathematical equations is anti-Hindu. One can criticize the objectives that Heartiste, or Dalrock, or I seek, and indeed, many feminists and equalitarians and white knights do. But there is nothing even remotely objectionable from any coherent moral standard about the mere knowledge of Game and its mechanisms.

22 comments:

I was having a conversation about this the other day. Most of us simply do not understand clearly what is going on. We aren't that smart, and the world is so confusing and terrifying. So we hold on to the one or two things we believe are true and shut out all the rest.

I think that's what is going on here w/re to game and religious people. Those of us who fear and believe in God see a world that is utterly terrifying. We aren't all that smart, and we've seen much smarter people "fall" to various ideologies and passing fads. So we look at the idea of game as being very threatening. It seems as this is one more thing to mislead and fool us into acting in opposition to God.

And there is truth in that idea of threat. A casual glance at the nihilistic comments on Heartist or Krausers blog shows people that think absolutely nothing of taking another mans wife, or daughter, or anything. And religious men in general are a threatened group these days, unless you are Muslim of course, so it is terrifying.

The irony is, I think, that Game mostly seems to be about teaching men what they should know intuitively, but have been conditioned out of by a very wicked and corrupted world.

I agree with Some dude, and I think it comes down to authority. Game bloggers are not an "appropriate" source of information for most people, let alone most church-going people. For the more virtuous sheep, avoiding "dens of iniquity" (which game blogs tend to be) is a safe heuristic in general. Looking for truth there sounds a little too much like saying you routinely visit the strip club "but only to hand out tracts," as it were.

Just like those who believe the stock market will always be a good long-term investment because that's the paradigm they inherited, which has a basis in past reality, good church-going folk believe what they hear in the pulpit and from properly-credentialed speakers is what they can (and "should") trust because it's associated (less and less correctly than it even ever was) with moral and spiritual authority.

So asking people to trust a game blogger over their (feminized) authoritative sources of information sounds like wolf-speak to their sheep ears. But to Vox's credit, of those well-intentioned people who wander into the game blogsphere and are (rightly, in a sense) appalled, many visitors here quickly realize that this "improper" viewpoint somehow rings true, cannot be easily dismissed even by Bible-believing Christians without the metaphorical insertion-of-fingers-into-ears-and-humming, and suddenly they begin to look around them with newly opened eyes and realize that perhaps what is being presented to them as truth needs to be sorted through before it's accepted.

I'd argue that that last bit is the real "red pill," for which the red pill with regards to one's understanding of game is but a significant subset and sometimes a major introduction. (if they were wrong about something of this magnitude, what else do I need to go back and question?)

Keynesianism == Feminism. Neither work but the prescription is more government intervention.

I think this is the best description so far. There is the market for goods and services, there is the market for sex, and the market for marriage.

Economic value is not the only value, and it is establshed subjectively. There is much overlap between SMV and MMV, but there are a few things on each side that destroy value on the other side.

Scripture, tradition, and natural law describe the bounds where activity is proper or evil - sinful - Stealing or even vandalizing to produce something is sinful, but the economic market doesn't care. And they say keep sex within marriage.

And as to Game or weakth, we are told to dauli deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Christ.

It is natural - as in fallen nature - to want a babe or a cad, but we are told to choose the better part.

This reminds me of something John Derbyshire has talked about: people who are able to dispassionately study things for the sake of knowledge itself are rare. Take guns: some people are able to see a gun as a tool, and recognize that any good or evil that is done with it is the responsibility of its holder, not inherent in the gun itself, so they can study the statistics and see what effect private gun ownership has on things like crime. But many people can't do that: when they look at the gun, they don't really see the gun at all; they see the violence that can come from it. They can't get past the emotional impact of that, so they're unable to consider the evidence that gun ownership reduces violence. "How could violence reduce violence?" they think.

We see the same thing with Game. People don't see the tool; they see the sneering PUA high-fiving his buddies on the way out of the club and the girl crying because he didn't call her the next day. They can't get past their emotional reaction to that, so they're unable to examine Game as a tool in itself. "How could seducing and discarding innocent girls be Christian?" they think.

Having said that, I think most of the anti-Game whiners are being disingenuous. I don't think that many men really agonize over whether Game conflicts with Christianity. They're just anti-Game, and they know that the best way to get Christians to oppose something is to say it's anti-Christian. There's an evolution of anti-Game commenting, which goes something like this (contradicting itself at each step):

1. Game doesn't work. Game experts are just con artists selling snake oil to sad saps who will never get laid.

2. Ok, Game works, but it's evil, because it's all about getting laid and treating women as objects, so no good man would use it.

3. Ok, Game doesn't have to be evil (men fixing their marriages proved #2 wrong), but since using it for good improves the life of the woman too, it must be supplicating, and the men using it aren't alpha at all! This one is really inventive, but no more true than the others.

I was just about to post a similar "progression", although this is what I've noticed since Mystery and Strauss came into popularity:

1. Game is a scam and doesn't work2. Ok, game MIGHT work but only on the most desperate and drunk of females3. Ok, game could possibly work on high quality females but only because they are being tricked4. Ok, women are wise to game, and it's still working, but it only works for shallow and short term relationships5. Ok ok, game might work long term, but it's immoral and you should develop "inner game" instead.

I see Game both ways: practical and theoretical. For most dudes the practical is the important part, the knowledge of pragmatic human engineering technique designed to accomplish a specific goal i.e. seduction.

But the Game Theorists are the "scientists" behind the "engineering". They look at broader patterns, and while you might discard both psychology and evolution in your personal belief system, it cannot be denied that the intellectual infrastructure for the growing sophistication of practical Game is due, in some part, on the ability of these theorists to aggregate data from their readers and run thought experiments and practical trials based on their theories. That has led to some impressive accomplishments and important breakthroughs in understanding as their findings and results are debated and argued about.

Game is fundamentally inductive. From a lot of particulars, general principles have been developed, but they don't obtain in every situation, hence "Next." But there are easy deductions based on the inductive results catalogued in the manosphere. Some of those easy deductions are bad due to bad premises. That's the case with a lot of Christian critics of Game. They start out thinking its all deductive and that there's only one way to apply a general principle. They think, game's purpose is to get a lot of women in bed, and that's a sin, therefore game is a modern evil.

I also agree, in particular with Some Dude and Ian. It's a deductive process, and for my money it's as close to a science as anything sociological is going to get. There is probably a term for the tendency to conflate facts and moral judgements about their possible uses, if only because it's such a common fallacy. Those who object to truth being known because of its possible weaponization should be reminded that their status quo rests on maintaining lies, which in any objective notion of morality is so flawed as to be false.

I'd love to sell GBFM his cars. You see every time he turned the key and the ignition failed I could sell him a new car since he'd never have the curiosity to look under the hood to see what was wrong.

It's not enough that the TV works when you turn it on, you have to know how it's built, how it works and why it works.

it cannot be denied that the intellectual infrastructure for the growing sophistication of practical Game is due, in some part, on the ability of these theorists to aggregate data from their readers and run thought experiments and practical trials based on their theories.

I think one reason christians struggle with Game (in practice if not in theory) is that it seemingly takes the control away from God – and therefore cannot be ‘of God’.

Essentially the fear is that learning Game (or relearning it because they often believe the principles were always in scripture) removes God from the process of finding, courting (dating) and eventually marrying the only woman he will (should) ever have sex with in his lifetime. Game necessitates a reliance on one’s own ‘understanding’ and depreciates the role of faith (and possibly divine intervention if a guy is prone to the soul-mate myth) in what should be the ‘cleaving to’ the woman whom God preordained and predestined to be his wife.

They believe that in learning and practicing Game (both single and married) that the message is "Don't worry God, I got this, I know Game."

It's a deductive process, and for my money it's as close to a science as anything sociological is going to get.

It occurs to me that the two aspects of human nature for which we have the most evidence and the most predictive power -- IQ and socio-sexual relations -- may also be the most derided as being suspect; while fields like psychology, which appears to be based on wild-ass guesses filtered through wishful thinking and political correctness, are almost universally accepted. That's probably not a coincidence.

Rollo, you may be right, but hasn't every Christian heard of, "God helps those who help themselves," and, "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish...."? If a guy thinks he's supposed to sit helplessly waiting for God to drop a wife in his lap, does he apply that same policy to getting a sandwich?

Game is a nuclear arms race, working to nullify the judgement and punishment of God. Sure, it works now, somewhat. But every year, women adapt.

The foundation is this: Isaiah 3:12. Because of sin, women and little children will be the rulers.

What is sin? Sin is lawlessness.

What is the Law? Genesis through to Deuteronomy.

The theologian Rushdoony outlined this systematically. Vox would do well to read the "Institutes of Biblical Law". Vox has gotten many things right, but his view of the Law is a gaping hole in his knowledge of Scripture.

Vox calls himself an internet super-intelligence. But he doesn't begin to approach the intelligence that Rushdoony had.

What I forgot to include in my previous post: when you know the root causes, Game is a mere bandaid over a festering wound.

Rushdoony outlines the Biblical solution that fixes the underlying causes, that will bind up the wound, cure the infection, and bring vibrant health to society.

In a Biblical society, male status defaults to one higher than women. My experiences in Amish, (old school) Mormon, and non-Western societies is that a man merely has to show up for the women to chase him. In a balanced society, the bulk of the men have a status higher than the bulk of women, so hypergamy is satisfied without any specific "game". When you have status, you naturally act according to it. No "faking" higher status than you have.

The fundamentals have to be sorted; the fundamentals are obedience to God. God has Laws. They are in the Bible. Game illuminates the consequences of sin, but its bandaid approach is nowhere near enough. So I say, it is a nuclear arms race... a race against God. And God always wins. Even the men with the best Game will stumble and be punished if they ignore this.

I couldn't find the Scripture the other day, but I remember reading something about it being wrong to even talk of the wicked deeds some sinners do. That would make pointing people to sites like CH a bit dubious (at best) if I remember it correctly.

I have no problem with the principles. My challenge is with the boast of evil deeds. That doesn't seem consistent with our call as Christians.